Improved gas detection and monitoring technologies are needed for a variety of emerging applications including:
(1) leak detection and quantification for oil and gas and chemical processing infrastructure,
(2) emissions monitoring from landfill and waste treatment facilities,
(3) monitoring and verification for carbon sequestration, and
(4) environmental terrestrial monitoring to better understand the carbon cycle.
Sensor solutions to meet the needs of emerging applications must provide cost effective, large-area, high-sensitivity, and quantitative detection of target gases, and will likely require mobile sensor platforms that incorporate spatial data such as GPS and GIS for spatial-registering, mapping and time-stamping of acquired datasets. For many applications, advanced measurement capabilities such as leak localization and flux estimation are also desired. The invention disclosed herein describes measurement techniques and data analysis methods that can be implemented using combinations of existing 3D topography and gas concentration sensor technologies to meet emerging measurement needs.
Over the past three decades 3D topographical scanning through such means as LiDAR and photogrammetry has become a powerful tool for large-area surveying, mapping and infrastructure monitoring. Recently, the cost of LiDAR and photogrammetric sensors for producing high-quality 3D spatial data have reached a point where the application and prevalence of 3D data has become widespread. Commercially available sensors can now map terrain and infrastructure with several centimeter precision from distances exceeding 1000 feet and at measurement rates exceeding 500,000 points per second. Data acquired with these sensors is used to create several distinct data representations of a measured topographic scene including: point clouds (See, e.g., the Point Cloud Library), digital surface models, and digital elevation models (See, e.g., OpenDEM). The emergence of 3D data types has been accompanied by the development of vast body of image processing software, such as the Point Cloud Library, for rapid and sophisticated exploitation of 3D data. Examples of common processing tasks for 3D point data include organization of the data in an efficiently searchable tree structure, segmentation of like objects within a scene, detection of occluded portions of a scene from a specified viewing location, surface reconstruction, shape detection and identification of objects in a scene (See, e.g., the Point Cloud Library). The combination of high-quality 3D data with these processing and analysis tools has the potential to play an important role in defining new and valuable measurement procedures for gas detection, localization, and quantification tasks.